Page - 17 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/02

16 | Anna-Katharina Höpflinger and Marie-Therese Mäder www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 7–21 pean context. They follow the idea of the “traditional wedding”, but this so-called tradition has mainly been formed by and communicated through media, especially since the 1950s. Its hallmarks include the assumption that the bride’s father will escort his daughter to the location where the wedding ceremony will take place, he will “give” her to the groom, a spoken element of the ritual will follow, often in- cluding vows, rings will be exchanged, music will be played. Eating and drinking are part of the ritual, usually after the ceremony just described, sometimes with music and dance incorporated. In the 1950s this form of wedding was globalized by media such as novels and television. Before the 1950s wedding rituals differed according to the wealth of the bridal pair, religious background, region, context (urban or rural), and circumstance (whether the bride was a virgin or a widow, for example).19 Weddings form an idea of the individual but only in light of collective expec- tations of how a wedding could and should be. Marriage ceremonies are col- lective events because more than two people are part of them, but they are also collective because they are associated with (and often based on) collective normative ideas of issues such as gender, hierarchy, sexuality, family, and rites of passage. Such collective norms are reproduced by individuals not only in ritu- als but also in language. In addition to their functions in joining two persons in a socio-religious or economic contract, the wedding, the bride, and the groom can also become metaphors for collective ideas and norms. The connotations of the wedding metaphor are normally positive, mirroring values such as love, close connec- tion, joy, happiness, even life’s purpose. Again, the media are crucial for the construction and transmission of these norms: the metaphors associated with marriage and weddings are media metaphors. They have been in place since antiquity, as we see in the examples of the story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius Madaurensis’s Metamorphoses / The Golden Ass or in Martianus Capella’s De nup­ tiis Philologiae et Mercurii (“On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury”). The private and the public, tradition and innovation, the collective and the individual are six categories that can be applied in analysing marriage rituals. They form a hectagony of perspectives, but they also merge into each other. The public is a collective space and tradition is based on collective norms, and weddings also sit between these categories: they are semi-private, semi-tradi- tional, and semi-individual. Wedding rituals thus form a point of intersection at which basic elements of living together coincide. They can be analysed from different angles and perspectives and with a focus on different media. (Audio-) visual media, clothes, music, and texts, for example, all play significant roles in this complex communication process, as the contributions to this issue show. 19 See Caloy 1989 (for the role of the bride); Wiswe 1990 (for the change in bridal gowns); Cohen Gross- man 2001 (for diversity in Jewish weddings).